I always hang in a buffalo stance. I do the dive every time I dance.

Safeway.
Ten pounds of spareribs.
Ten dollars.
In my freezer.
Mmm-hmm.
That's five racks, kids.
In my freezer.
Five racks.


The sale goes on through, like, Monday or Tuesday I think.

For various reasons, I'm not a fan of Prairie Home Companion. But today they have:
1. Martin Sheen.
2. Arlo Guthrie.
3. Steve Martin.

I think this is how this particular radio show goes "balls to the wall."

I'm not reposting the Neda Soltani video. If you haven't seen it, it's an amateur videorecording of a young woman in Iran dying in the street during a protest just days ago. At first we aren't sure what happened; a dazed woman with some blood around her feet is lowered to the ground by people around her. Her body is oddly passive, but her eyes are darting all around, at one point looking directly into the camera. People around her are crouching over her and shouting things. Then, blood begins pouring from her mouth and nose. It's just terrible. You can find it if you want to.


··· Okay, so Barack Obama gave a 4-star general a direct order to cut Stephen Colbert's hair. Note Obama's skill at deadpan humor. Regardless of party, this is now a key voting issue for me.


··· Totallylookslike.com will suck you in. Via wesa.


··· Great little short film, "Sebastian's Voodoo". It's a Boingboing repost; you might have already seen it.


··· Good online comic: Survive!!. Via Warren Ellis.


··· Great comic from a great webcomic series, Subnormality. This is one of those things where you should probably start at the beginning. There aren't too terribly many of them and it's well worth the time.


··· Seed Bombs to combat desertification. Oddly, I can see this being economically viable. Maybe. If the areas aren't easily accessible by land. I'm thinking two or three guys and a Land Rover, or two or three guys and half dozen camels.


··· Yootoob: Hitler loved Jews. Who knew?


··· Tactical corsets. They're kind of new and the website isn't done yet, but it's FUNNY. Look on the right and scroll down.

So, wait, Wil Wheaton was filming, like, five blocks from my house?

...Uh, okay.


And I do love the idea of him geeking out in the gold room at Powell's...

Seriously. No real nudity, but still NSFW. Try and guess the point where I leaned toward the screen and said, out loud, "Holy fu— ...Jesus!"

This is eight levels above anything you've ever seen in an actual strip club.

Embedded to bypass Youtube's mature content filter.



Via damnportlanders.

ETA: Was broken for a bit. Fixed. And hey, look up more of her—it's up there on the Youtubes.

··· From Kung Fu Monkey by way of ianmcin, a notion:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

··· Meatcards.com, via my friend Matt, via Boingboing probably. I'd totally buy some of these if, you know, I could. No price or ordering information yet, as they're still kind of in beta.


··· Yootoob: Some neat guitar work with totally amusing facial narration.


··· Yootoob: The Axis of Awesome: 4 Chords. And don't forget that Pachelbel rant.


··· Artist Peter Funch took multiple photographs of the same streetcorners and edited together various passers-by into fun final works. Gallery.


··· Fear The Bacon Lance. With vegetarian version following! (When he says "beefsticks," he means "breadsticks." He corrects himself later on.).

ETA: archmage points out that the beefstick-breadstick thing was a film editing continuity error only. The guy did it with beefsticks in a cucumber first, then breadsticks. This is a cut-down video.


··· Yootoob: Worst Breakup Ever. Via worshipthesnake. Sound NSFW.


··· If you haven't seen GI Joe: Resolute, go do it now. It's a series of 11 four-or-five-minute animated episodes written by Warren Ellis. You know how a lot of the beloved cartoons from our youth, like Transformers and such, have been remade in such a way as to have raped our childhoods? Well, as one blogger put it, Warren Ellis made sweet, passionate love to my childhood, and he had a really big dick.

Instead of just squirting some oil on my bike chain when it gets rattly, I'll usually take it off the bike and clean it in my kitchen sink with a toothbrush and Dawn detergent. Then I rinse it thoroughly and bake it dry in the oven. Then I oil it.

New chains cost $15.

Fruit fly season is upon us. I got a few in a bag of cherries from Safeway today. "Fuck that shit," I thought, remembering my infestation last summer. I whipped up my eradication method with a quickness:

1. Small amount of water—1/4 or 1/2 cup is enough— in a drinking glass or whatever.
2. Dissolve a lot of sugar in it.
3. Add a little bit of dishwashing liquid. If it doesn't want to dissolve properly, microwave the concoction and stir again.
4. Leave out.

The cider-vinegar-in-a-glass thing works, too, but then your place smells like cider vinegar all day, and I don't think it works quite as well as the sugar-detergent bit. The weird thing with sugar-detergent is that you don't see any corpses in the glass. They go elsewhere to die.

I haven't analyzed the subject much, but I'll agree with my freshman-sophomore French teacher in HS when I answer, "Je vous aime, mon haricot vert." Translated, it means, "I love you, my string bean."

A little late, but here, reposted from wesa:



I remember watching these scenes on tv, on the black-and-white set in the kitchen. I can hardly grasp the idea that twentysomethings and younger in China barely even know this happened.

I still wonder what became of the person who stood in front of the tank column holding the shopping bags. I expect that he or she is dead, many government agents and staffpersons having been assigned to determine the person's identity and capture him or her by any means necessary. The 2008 Olympics showed us that any claims China might make about citizens' freedoms and rights are still a cruel joke. But maybe the person is alive somewhere. And that hurts even more, because he or she can never, ever speak to anyone, save possibly for very close family members, about that event, for fear of being taken into custody, and tortured, and killed.

Turns out the weird irregular fan-revving in my computer case wasn't a buggy onboard thermostat fan voltage varying thingy like I thought. I'd been cooking up ideas to spoof the onboard plug into thinking a fan was attached to it (BIOS won't let the thing boot if there's nothing on the plug) and power the thing directly off the power supply. But I finally actually opened the case and looked. The CPU fan was constant. The noise was coming from... the video card fan? Well poop, that's easy. It's not the kind of fan that's worth cleaning and oiling—I've been down that road, and you just end up cleaning and oiling it again in a couple of weeks, rinse and repeat. It was gummy and slow and needed to die.

I went into my stores and fished out an old 486 heatsink and fan. I yoinked the fan, clipped and stripped some wires, soldered the old fan's connector on (man, I haven't soldered anything in years), zip-tied it onto the old fan's metal cage, plugged it in, and hey, silent computer for the first time in six months.

Six months? Why did you wait so long to take care of this?

Shush.

The bike ride wasn't that long, but I hadn't expected to ride the whole way, so it was a case of surprise ridesecks, I guess.

( kinda big )

Hey, internet, I have a basic account and just learned that I can upgrade to plus for free (more userpics, polls, etc.). Are there any strings? Will the advertising on my page get worse? Will I get harassed to go to a paid account? Thanks.

I just got home. I left my house at three.

A couple three hours in there was me stopping to browse and take pictures at various places along the way, but dude, I walked from my apartment in Goose Hollow to Ikea and back. Holy fucking shit.

Here's my route.

And by the way, that whole area from 82nd and Killingsworth up to Alderwood Road can eat a giant bag of dicks. Both Gmaps and my AAA map are just wrong--some recent construction up there rerouted some stuff and the railroad underpass is in a completely different place; I added an extra mile or so just hiking around and cursing, in part because one of the streets I wanted to take had no shoulder and no sidewalk.

My calves hurt and my butt cheeks are kinda mad at each other, but I think I came out of it pretty well.


ETA: Oh, side note: that bit where I cut that corner north of Alderwood? It's right under the flight path of landing aircraft. There are no fences and there is no signage telling people to keep out. It's very flat ground covered in scrub meadow grass dotted with really lush greener areas and putting-green-sized patches of what might be purple loosestrife. It would be a great spot for a picnic.


ETA: Actually, I'm full of shit WRT the railroad underpass. Gmaps is accurate. The route I took is new and not on my AAA map. The underpass at 92nd is on my map. That's what fucked me up.

Great piece in the local paper about all the damned attention Portland has been getting from the NYT.

I read it in the paper, but damnportlanders reminded me to post it.

Kind of dumb to post this now, Friday before Memorial Day Weekend, but whatever—the queue needs clearing:


··· Yootoob: Neat little video on open-mindedness as it applies to the conflict between science and the paranormal. Now, I'm kind of the wrong guy to ask on this subject, because while I do believe in rigorous science, I think that the scientific community in general has been irresponsible for many years with regard to the study of the paranormal. I think that it has been written off to quickly, too often, before any study is even conducted. Worse, I think that legitimate findings have been ignored or minimized. I don't think we have adequate tools to really understand what causes paranormal phenomena, but I believe that some exist, that some of those can at least be detected, and that they will all eventually be explained and probably exploited for the benefit of humankind, like any other natural phenomenon. I'm pretty confident it won't happen in my lifetime. The only thing I know for sure, however, is that this video has made me reevaluate how I talk about these views of mine, and I'll certainly change some things for future conversations.


··· Stegosaur-esque animal in a 600yo+ Kmer temple carving? The head is wrong for a stegosaurus and looks more like a later evolution of the animal's line, if it did evolve into, say, a porcine something or other. Was there an animal back then in that part of the world with bony fanlike backplates like those of a stegosaur? I can easily imagine such an animal being hunted to extinction by humans of the Kmer era, so the fact that it's not around now proves nothing. I really want to see a plain old razorback-type pig in that carving, but it's tough.


··· Your brain is defective. Neat little optical illusion up on Boingboing.


··· Also on Boingboing, Lovecraft fans, rejoice, because, following a stroke, a woman has developed a "pale, milky-white and translucent third arm," visible only to her, that she can use to scratch itchy parts of her body. The arm cannot pass through solid objects, she says, and MRIs confirm that her brain behaves like it's actually moving a limb.


··· Decent and loooong page of jokes on author John Varley's website. See especially the entry for 1/21/09. I think I might have already posted this.


··· Well this is kind of neat. Yootoob: Music and Life, Alan Watts (visuals by Tre Parker and Matt Stone). Via herince_emyn.


··· Oneword.com does recognize line breaks, but doesn't display them in the main page. You have to click the little ellipsis "show all" link on your entry after you're done. I guess this actually could be a useful poetry tool. It's already a good prose tool.


··· Yootoob: Hot, hot mountain bike parkour, or at least that's the paraphrase of how Kottke put it, but I recall this sort of thing going on long before parkour hit it big. And this guy is eighteen different kinds of badass.

After playing Bioshock for a solid two hours and then heading out for a pack of ciggies, I spied this in front of the dumpster near my old 1910's apartment-converted house:

( Read more... )

As I was pawing through it and picking out the stuff I wanted, my brain repeatedly made the "you just got an item!" noise.

Awesome?

A few years ago, I came up with the idea of the Portland Bridge Lap, wherein I ride my bicycle from my home to Portland Metro's northernmost bridge (St. John's Bridge), cross it, ride south, cross the southernmost bridge (Sellwood Bridge), and ride home. I had no idea of the mileage, but it's a pretty good haul. It was sort of a Big Bad Destination Project in my mind, one that would involve a good road repair kit, lots of water, a really good day and lots of determination.

Whatever.

Last night produced a magickal confluence of factors that (a) made me wake up around midday and (b) make me want to do something besides sit around the apartment. Did I mention that I had today off due to the recession? Yeah, 32-hour weeks at work these days due to slow business. Shit for saving money, but rah for three-day weekends. Anyway, I geared up and set out on the bike for a random ride. Now, I never do this. I usually need a destination when I ride. It could be just needing more Pepsi, and I think, "Self, let's ride 100 blocks to the Walmart on SE 82nd and get some Pepsi." But today was just getting out of the house. That was the only mission.

I rode north along the river into extreme northwest, on a whim. I stopped into Crosscut Lumber, my local exotic wood supplier, to ask about ipe prices (I want to build a little swing-up table for the landing on my apartment's new back staircase) and to gawk at the purpleheart (it really is a striking purple color—the photo doesn't do any justice) and the other awesome hardwoods. I hit the bathroom at the bar next door and decided hey, fuck it, let's do the bridge lap. About a year ago I made up a crash kit that I keep in a little zippered bag that goes everywhere my bike goes. Any problem I have with the bike short of headset, bottom bracket, and sprocket problems can be solved with this kit. I didn't have any water, but that's why God made convenience stores. Fuck it. Just go.

The main goal was fitness, so I kicked up the gears a couple of notches above normal to keep the heart pumping. It still was no big deal at all. When I conceived of the idea, I was in a sedentary job. Now I'm on my feet all day manipulating heavy objects in a shop with bad HVAC. Heat is trivial. Cardiovascular stress is trivial. So aside from a little bit of leg burn, 26 miles blew by with no event aside from some great views of Portland cityscapes and some goddamned attractive joggers and bikers. At one point in North Portland, I plucked a jutting mustard flower as I blew by, sniffing at it for novelty before I threw it away. It smelled so good that I hung onto it and sniffed at it now and then for four or five minutes. Hi, I'm a bike-riding flower-sniffing Portland hippie.

And I never did stop for water.

Here's my route (zoom out for better scale, and parts of it make more sense in satellite view). The little jog between SW 10th and 11th is me stopping at Safeway for a two-liter of Pepsi, a half-gallon of milk, and a sweet, sweet six pack of Pabst tallies. I forewent the bike rack and rode the bike into the underground parking garage for shits and giggles.

Well here's something... Have any enemies? Want to get them taken into federal custody with little effort and little or no recourse for the person or their family? Don't care if the person is a juvenile? Go for it.

The ACLU and others have been hammering away at the more ridiculous aspects of the Patriot Act for years, but remember that Barack Obama's election hasn't erased the law from the books. We still have far to go on this front.